After narrowly missing an assassination of Margaret Thatcher by bombing her hotel room in Brighton in 1984, the IRA reminded everyone the odds were still on its side. “Remember we only have to be lucky once,” the terrorists warned the then British prime minister. “You will have to be lucky always.”

That in a nutshell has long been the strategy of those fighting against the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion. With every court challenge, political stunt, blockade and act of sabotage, the odds have been stacked ever higher against the pipeline happening. Its builders and their political backers might win a few rounds. But eventually something would stop them. Maybe Thursday’s federal appeals court decision overturning the National Energy Board’s approval of Trans Mountain is that something. Maybe not. But the project will face many more assassination attempts. And it will have to be lucky enough to survive every one.

You can find optimistic spins on this latest setback. They should be ignored. Finance Minister Bill Morneau sounded only positive notes Thursday — that the ruling offered “good direction on next steps” to make sure the pipeline “moves ahead in the right way.” But it is not moving ahead, it’s moving backward. Construction must stop. Trans Mountain has lost its government licence to proceed.

The government need not return to Square One, but the remedies demanded by the appeals court — a new environmental assessment on the effect of more oil tankers on killer whales and a fresh round of consultation with Aboriginals — are not the small matters some people are suggesting. They will take a year at least and likely longer. Any appeal to the Supreme Court would take even longer, should the Liberal government decide to try that long shot.

Just getting this decision took nearly a year. It was the 18th court challenge the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion faced. Regulators and Kinder Morgan, the project’s owner up until this week, had prevailed 17 times. The project could not afford to lose even once. It just did.

The pessimists have it right, again. The Trans Mountain expansion was more meticulously threaded through all of Canada’s innumerable regulatory hoops than any project before. Kinder Morgan’s Canadian president, Ian Anderson, had taken to heart the vital importance of going over and above every minimum threshold, making it his personal mission to meet with First Nations groups all over B.C. and Alberta and listen to their concerns. Regulators under both Conservative and Liberal governments had worked to get Trans Mountain approved, and yet still failed to meet standards that judges can and do change any time they wish.

As former Saskatchewan premier Brad Wall noted dismally, the same judge behind this ruling — Eleanor Dawson — was behind the previous ruling against Northern Gateway. Regulators had reportedly tried using her last ruling as a roadmap to ensure perfect compliance for Trans Mountain. This time, her court came up with yet new boxes it decided it now wants checked. Listening to First Nations’ concerns is not enough now; the rules now must require a dialogue done “interactively.”

It’s important to remember that the regulators who failed in defending first the Northern Gateway proposal and now the Trans Mountain expansion plan before the courts (and who failed to conclude hearings over Energy East) once knew how to get things approved. Older folks will remember that we have built major projects in this country before. The expertise hasn’t changed. But the rules always do.

It is at least fitting that some of those responsible for this chaos are today suffering the political consequences of it. When the National Energy Board recommended in May 2016 that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government approve the Trans Mountain expansion, I wrote in these pages that “the approval authority of the NEB was already looking DOA, long before it tabled its ruling, and in no small part because Trudeau had delivered it … a good, hard wallop.” He refused to allow the Northern Gateway pipeline to secure approval. He demanded enough new regulatory requirements for the Energy East pipeline proposal to make it unfeasible.

He denounced the previous Conservative government for failing to do proper environmental due diligence and to consult adequately with First Nations. And he has bragged ever since that he’s been fixing all that and, unlike the last government, he’ll get a pipeline to the sea. Now the courts say he didn’t do proper environmental due diligence or consult adequately with First Nations. And that he won’t soon be getting that pipeline, either.

Incredibly, Morneau was still at it on Thursday, blaming this disaster on him having “‘inherited a flawed environmental review process” (those are virtually the same words that were used by the Tsleil-Waututh First Nation, one of the groups behind this appeal!). Yet it was his government that approved it anyway — after what the Liberal Natural Resource minister assured us just this week was a “very rigorous review process.” And was it not just three months ago that Morneau was insisting that, with his plan to nationalize away the risk of Kinder Morgan’s project, it could not fail to get built? Funny the finance minister didn’t mention his dissatisfaction with any “flawed environmental review process” back then.

It was in May, too, that Alberta Premier Rachel Notley crowed “we said we would get the pipeline built and we are getting it built!” But the NDP leader spent years in opposition making common cause with anti-oilsands activists. In government she hired extreme environmentalists as consultants. Now, having penalized Canada’s hydrocarbon province with a CO2-sin tax in the name of winning a “social licence” that will never exist, her NDP government, too, has been hoist with its own petard.

There’s no evidence the IRA ever tried again to assassinate Thatcher. But against Trans Mountain, plenty more fuses will be set now. That new review on the whale habitat will offer yet more ammunition to opponents. The consultations with First Nations will yield more concerns to antagonize judges. And, as constitutional lawyer Howard Anglin points out, the fact that the government will own Trans Mountain while also deciding on its approval invites fresh new arguments, possibly legal ones, about conflict of interest.

It just so happens, as you’ll read elsewhere, that it was shortly after the court’s bombshell Thursday that the results of the vote by Kinder Morgan shareholders whether to approve the federal government’s $4.5 billion purchase offer, was announced as 99 per cent in favour. Investors know an unwinnable political situation when they see one, even if the politicians themselves haven’t yet clued in.

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